My Autobiography And Reminiscences (Volume III)

Step inside the crowded salons, smoky studios and teeming streets of Victorian London with one of its most celebrated painters as your guide. In this final instalment of his Victorian artist autobiography, William Powell Frith looks back over a lifetime at the easel, turning his eye from the canvas to the personalities and intrigues that shaped his Victorian painting career. The studio doors finally open. Written as a richly detailed nineteenth century memoir, this intimate William Powell Frith memoir traces the rise of a Royal Academy insider, blending anecdote, professional reflection and sharply observed social portraiture into an absorbing art history memoir. As Frith recalls fellow Royal Academy artists, patrons, critics and the wider stage of 19th century Britain, he captures Victorian London society from the vantage-point of the exhibition wall: its crowds, fashions, ambitions and anxieties. The result is both a vivid British art world memoir and an essential primary source for art history students and for Victorian studies readers seeking a living voice from within the period. Whether approached as leisurely life-writing or as documentary history, it rewards any curious reader. Out of print for decades and now republished by Alpha Editions. Restored for today's and future generations. More than a reprint - a collector's item and a cultural treasure.